On loneliness, doing the right thing, and the mouthing of empty platitudes

I am currently doing the right thing. (Right by a certain definition. I’m not going to get into that, but there is a whole post in that phrase alone. A different post.) Some time ago, I decided that I was going to clean up my act. I was going to stop with the dating (let’s just leave it at dating, shall we?) of random girls who I didn’t have any long-term interest in, and I was going to actually try and be someone that a decent woman would have a long term interest in. Doing the right thing sucks sometimes.

When I initially made the decision, it was actually fairly easy. I was disillusioned with women in general, I was sick of casual ‘relationships’, and I was enjoying a brand new job in a new place. The first couple of months went by in a flash; no loneliness or ennui with life. Then I started to feel it. I missed calling a girl late in the day and talking, or the feeling of her (whoever she might be) hand in mine. There are those (see; who I was a year ago, for example) who would say just nut up and go meet girls. Yeah, okay, that is an option, but I’m not in a place where I can really start a long term relationship effectively, and I’m deliberately forgoing short term relationships. There the suckage enters in. You see, somehow I have absorbed this idea that I’m never supposed to admit that I’m lonely. It probably comes from some early childhood experience or other screwing with my ideas of how the sexes relate. Five years (or so) ago I started down the path of pickup, and that obviated it. Even just the casual chats helped. So I no longer had to hide the fact that I was crashingly, desperately alone. I wasn’t. Sadly, it was a bandaid solution. Physical contact and even shallow emotional contact helps, but they only mask the symptoms.

Recently, I’ve opened up to some people I trust a lot, and they keep telling me the same thing – to wit – “Be patient. She’ll come along.” Do people just not realize how offensive that is? Sometimes (not to be melodramatic) it feels like telling someone who is in physical pain to be patient, because pain fades. When you are in physical pain, you DO something about it. If you need it, you take powerful drugs that drive the pain away. But for whatever reason, we have this cultural rule that the only solution for emotional pain is patience. There has to be some line between passive waiting and man-whore, but there really doesn’t seem to be one that is logically consistent.

Here we get to the meat; the propositional logic.

A) Loneliness sucks.

B) There are methods that can quite effectively ensure relationships of a sort.

It can be readily demonstrated from these four propositions that the extrema of passivity and activity are mutually exclusive in the relational sphere, but that leaves one with a problem. Humans are creatures both of absolute extremes and very subtle nuance. I never really got practiced enough at game (I really only ever played when I was feeling particularly lonely; it is too high maintenance to play it the way someone like Roosh or Heartiste does) to get the nuance of playing different types of girls; I usually just went after the drunken college chicks. Maybe more practice (prohibited by the whole ‘right thing’ thing) would help with that, but obviously that isn’t really an option.